To encourage industry and promote city expansion in the 1920s, the Franklin Kiwanis Club proclaimed its city Tennessee's Handsomest Town. As this fashionable moniker suggests, the city of Franklin, Tennessee, was and still is justifiably proud of its award-winning Main Street, picturesque rolling hills, and stately antebellum mansions. But the real history of Franklin and its people encompasses much more. Prehistoric mastodon hunters. Native American villages. Civil War battles. Floods. Urban sprawl. Political squabbles. Industrialization. And historic preservation.
A bicentennial project, this chronicle will provide readers an overview of the long and often colorful past of Tennessee’s oldest county. In addition to numerous photographs, this comprehensive county history includes information on dozens of communities, religious denominations, clubs and organizations, museums, visitor centers and recreational sites, and more than 100 notable people.
Tennessee, the long, thin state stretching from the Great Smoky Mountains to the Mississippi River, is as richly varied in history as in terrain. And from Davy Crockett, "Old Hickory" Andrew Jackson, and presidential candidate Estes Kefauver's coonskin cap, it has derived the colorful image of a frontier state. Tennessee has been a land of many kinds of frontiers--from the day in 1540 when Spaniards in armor, fevered for gold and glory, struggled along the river banks near present-day Memphis, to the latest developments in radiation research at today's complicated laboratories in Oak Ridge.
This book, published in commemoration of Tennessee's two hundred years of statehood, brings together two hundred stories about the influential figures, both the famous and the not so famous, who have marched across the state's history. This project began in 1986 when then-Governor Lamar Alexander asked Alex Haley, the celebrated author of Roots, to produce a special volume for the state bicentennial at the University of Tennessee. Although Haley died while the work was in progress, the now completed book reflects his love of the human-interest story as an effective way of capturing the drama and wonder of history. Ranging from the frontier era through the late twentieth century and covering all parts of the state, 200 Years through 200 Stories brings to life a host of colorful figures: Nancy Ward (Nan-ye-i), the "Beloved Woman of the Cherokee" who sought to promote harmony between her people and the early white settlers; Davy Crockett, the legendary frontiersman and political hero; Confederate Captain Spencer Talley, a participant in the bloody fighting at Stones River; Hanson Caruthers, a black slave who donned the Union blue and fought for his freedom; Estes Kefauver, the maverick U.S. senator who took on corporations, organized crime, and even President Truman; and Alex Stewart, a master Appalachian craftsman whose marvelous skills won him the Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Their stories and those of the many others who fill this volume enable the reader to grasp the larger historical developments -- settlement and statehood, Civil War and Reconstruction, the rise of industry and technology -- that have shaped Tennessee's history and the livesof its people. In addition to the two hundred stories focusing on individuals, the book includes several overview essays that summarize pivotal events during the key phases of the state's history. The result is a book that will delight anyone who loves Tennessee and its rich and varied heritage.
On the occasion of Tennessee's Bicentennial, four distinguished authors offer new insights and a broader appreciation of the classical influences that have shaped the architectural, cultural, and educational history of its capital city. Nashville has been many things: frontier town, Civil War battleground, New South mecca, and Music City, U.S.A. It is headquarters for several religious denominations, and also the home of some of the largest insurance, healthcare, and publishing concerns in the country. Located culturally as well as geographically between North and South, East and West, Nashville is centered in a web of often-competing contradictions. One binding image of civic identity, however, has been consistent through all of Nashville's history: the classical Greek and Roman ideals of education, art, and community participation that early on led to the city's sobriquet, "Athens of the West," and eventually, with the settling of the territory beyond the Mississippi River, the "Athens of the South." Illustrated with nearly a hundred archival and contemporary photographs, Classical Nashville shows how Nashville earned that appellation through its adoption of classical metaphors in several areas: its educational and literary history, from the first academies through the establishment of the Fugitive movement at Vanderbilt; the classicism of the city's public architecture, including its Capitol and legislative buildings; the evolution of neoclassicism in homes and private buildings; and the history and current state of the Parthenon, the ultimate symbol of classical Nashville, replete with the awe-inspiring 42-foot statue of Athena by sculptor Alan LeQuire. Perhaps Nashville author John Egerton best captures the essence of this modern city with its solid roots in the past. He places Nashville "somewhere between the 'Athens of the West' and 'Music City, U.S.A.,' between the grime of a railroad town and the glitz of Opryland, between Robert Penn Warren and Robert Altman." Nashville's classical identifications have always been forward-looking, rather than antiquarian: ambitious, democratic, entrepreneurial, and culturally substantive. Classical Nashville celebrates the continuation of classical ideals in present-day Nashville, ideals that serve not as monuments to a lost past, but as sources of energy, creativity, and imagination for the future of a city.
